Patriots deploy free stadium-wide Wi-Fi to compete with the comforts of home

Nothing can replace watching a sports game at the local stadium—except for HD TVs, warm living rooms and nearby snacks. A recent ESPN poll found that 41 percent of fans would rather watch a game at home than at a stadium.

“You have your own bathroom, the fridge is 10 feet away and the cost of a big-screen TV is less than it ever was,” says Fred Kirsch, publisher and VP of content at the New England Patriots football franchise. “Those are really hard to compete with.”

But the Patriots are hoping to do just that by rolling out free Wi-Fi at Gillette Stadium this season to give fans a more connected experience at the team’s eight home games. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell endorsed this idea in May, saying every NFL stadium should have high-speed Wi-Fi for its fans.

The Patriots’ stadium used to rely on cellphone networks for mobile traffic, but that approach couldn’t handle the large number of photo uploads and status updates fans transmitted during games.

After piloting Wi-Fi in 2012, the team and networking vendor Enterasys are rolling it out in full for the upcoming 2013-14 football season. The network will have 360 access points and enough bandwidth to handle at least 16,000 concurrent users.

The app will include live play-by-play, bathroom wait times, a tool for ordering concessions from your seat, and access to NFL RedZone.

Along with the Wi-Fi network, the Patriots developed a mobile app called Patriots Game Day Live, available to anyone attending a game at Gillette Stadium. The team tested a version of the app last season with fans in luxury club seats and although only 10 percent of those fans used it, Kirsch says the team hopes to see that number increase by offering content that’s only available through the app.

“We are trying to give things here that you can’t get in your living room,” he says.

The app will include live play-by-play, bathroom wait times, a tool for ordering concessions from your seat, and access to NFL RedZone, a live compilation of all the scoring plays from games around the league.

The Wi-Fi network is expected to allow 40 percent of the 70,000 fans in the stadium to connect simultaneously. Kirsch says that, down the line, the team hopes to add unique content such as audio from players wearing microphones and video from the sidelines or locker room.

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IBM, Verizon to compete for $10 billion in government cloud work

IBM, Verizon and eight other companies will compete for $10 billion worth of work to help move the U.S. Department of the Interior’s IT systems to the cloud.

The Department of Interior (DOI) anticipates saving over $100 million a year between 2016 and 2020 by shifting workloads from the 400 data centers that it now maintains.

“These contracts will not only allow us to move these apps to the cloud, but move them in a well-planned, methodical way,” wrote Andrew Jackson, DOI deputy assistant secretary for technology, information and business services, in a statement.

Ten companies have each been awarded an Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contracts that will allow them to compete for individual task orders in building out the Interior Department’s cloud. AT&T, IBM, CGI Group, Unisys, Verizon, Lockheed Martin, Aquilent, Autonomic Resources, Global Technology Resources and Smartronix all were awarded contracts.

Typically with an IDIQ contract, a company is not awarded any money initially. An IDIQ is often referred to as a license to hunt, meaning that it is a set of terms that have been pre-negotiated between the vendor and the agency to expedite the process of issuing work orders.

With this IDIQ, the DOI will issue task orders for individual projects, which these 10 companies will compete for. Each company can be awarded up to $1 billion of work for DOI.

Other U.S. federal government agencies can use the IDIQ contract vehicle for their own work as well.

The first project under this contract vehicle will be to set up and host an SAP implementation. The agency will also issue task orders for virtual machines, storage, database hosting, secure file transfers, Web hosting, as well as for maintaining development and test environments.

The contract vehicle was scheduled to be issued in May, but was held up by a protest from a vendor that was not included in the final selection. CenturyLink argued that the contract wording was too vague to be truly competitive. The Court of Federal Claims struck down that challenge last week.

The DOI has been working with cloud computing for awhile. In 2012, the agency began consolidating all of its email and collaboration services to a cloud service, Google Apps for Government.

For IBM, the DOI contract is potentially the largest cloud computing job the company has been awarded. IBM expects that it will use the assets from its recent purchase of IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) provider Softlayer, which it plans to use in its Smart Cloud for Government hosted service.

Comprised of 16 bureaus and offices, the DOI oversees federal owned lands and U.S. natural resources, including 500 million acres of park lands. Its annual IT budget is more than $1 billion a year.

Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for the IDG News Service.
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